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Comment by commandersaki | Hacker News Reader

This isn't really a question.

I love the idea of bcachefs, it gives a lot of the features of btrfs but includes encryption which means no luks song and dance. But having played around it on my laptop and raspberry pi(s), as root filesystem, it just can't be trusted at the moment. I can't remember the exact problem but I ran into bugs jumping to a new version of the kernel where bcachefs stopped working, and having to downgrade but then the format had changed (I think I caused this), and I was just in a completely broken state. I really wanted to figure it out, but after contemplating after the fact, I just don't want to deal with those kind of headaches for now.

I want to be able to use it in a way that I can rely on it for say the next 10 or 20 years, but it just isn't in that state. I can only feel comfortable using it on data or systems that I am not vested in.

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How long ago was this?

We've been cranking through bugs fast, and there are still bug reports coming in but the severity and frequency has declined drastically, while the userbase has gone up; polling the userbase it's been stabilizing fast.

But we won't really know we're there until we're there, so the main thing I can say is: if you report a bug like that, it'll get looked at fast; the debugging tools are top notch.

I had discussed on the OFTC IRC channel at the time which looks like around 2025-06-09, the last issue seemed to have been nasty. I think while you said it was fixed, I couldn't un-eff my specific situation, and I think I gave up.

I am grateful that you make accessing support quite easy by being available on the #bcache IRC channel with a lot of community support as well, but it is sometimes hard to fix these issues -- in my case I was usually in a VGA console without network access, so I couldn't simply export information/logs/diagnostics to show you without pulling out my phone camera etc. and that becomes a bit tedious in itself. It is partly my fault for using bcachefs for the root filesystem, with encryption etc. but I also knew what I was in for and I wanted to help provide the feedback and experience needed to help out.

It is just that, after awhile, I felt like I kept running into issue after issue, and I kind of just gave up. I do run bcachefs for a secondary drive that is used for storage purpose and it has been great. But yeah, I think running as root fs is just a scary proposition, especially if you don't want to put in the hard yards to diagnose and fix issues as they come and be on top of them. I used Arch, so I was at the time getting the latest version of bcachefs and upgrading constantly.

That does happen sometimes. But look on the bright side; a lot of people are getting crash courses in low level systems debugging, and those are skills that are not as common as they used to be - but they're still important.

If you look at the field of filesystem developers and kernel developers, we don't have nearly as many young people getting involved and learning this stuff as we used to, and that's a problem. We need a pipeline of people building deep expertise, and if even a tiny fraction of the people getting involved with the bcachefs community start developing an interest and learning this stuff, that's a success.

Six months ago was also still a very hectic time for debugging and stabilization, it's definitely gotten better.

What I've heard is that Kent is very proactive in listening to any and all bug reports to chase down root causes of issues like yours. I'm sure that any information you send his way to try to reproduce the issue would be helpful.

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